In order to respond to a customer's requirements in terms of function, economics, and quality for increasingly complex services, an IT service provider must have tools to effectively manage a service portfolio used by the IT service provider to service customer systems. In general, a provider's portfolio includes many services provided by a network of service suppliers. Occasionally, there is a need to upgrade or change an IT service portfolio. The ability to decompose an IT service process allows the service provider to identify certain parts of the currently offered service process which might be considered for replacement by other services for quality, efficiency, or cost considerations.
On a technical level the composition of Web Services for the purpose of building more complex services has become an active area of exploration. Several commonly accepted approaches and methods have been implemented in a wide number of software tools. The paradigm of composing and arranging atomic web services into complex services is generally a bottom-up approach. From a provider's perspective, bottom-up composition of atomic services into complex services is important, particularly when composing new services based on service processes.
Equally important is the ability to replace existing services or constituent elements of services with comparable services. However, problems have been encountered when seeking to replace one service or service element with another service or service element. In practice, the functions of existing service processes and their associated process steps are typically not well-defined. As a result, the replacement of even a single process step is difficult because the service provider does not know if the replacement process has comparable capability.
A typical situation 100 encountered in the prior art is depicted in FIG. 1. A service provider is providing an IT service process 110 comprised of process step 1, 112; process step 2, 114; process step 3, 116; process step 4, 118; and process step 5, 120. A trigger event 102 occurs and it becomes necessary to update process step 3, 116. Typical triggering events are addition of a new service supplier; withdrawal of a service by a provider or supplier; under performing IT services (quality, availability, efficiency, etc.); fluctuation in market prices for IT services; and change in technological standards. Although possible service suppliers 130; service processes 140 and service process steps 142 to be used in replacing process step 116 are known to the service provider, the prior art is beset by limitations in deciding how to select among them when creating the new IT service process 150 with new process step 116′.
Another typical situation occurs when it is unclear if a service originally composed according to specific criteria, for example “best service level-to-cost criteria”, after a period of time remains adequately efficient taking into account services or suppliers which were added later. Recomposing the whole service is a destructive process. It could mean reestablishment of conventions and renegotiation of service levels, while decomposition of a service that is deemed to be efficient could affect smaller areas of a service-provider business. This is even more problematic in a multi-customer environment where a single process step can be used by several different customers' service processes.
This lack of information may result in an expensive process-reengineering effort to the disadvantage of the customer as well as to the provider. The efficient and flexible management of IT service processes correlates with the service provider's ability to conform to service supplier management standard processes. Nevertheless, a service provider needs to have the ability to adjust its processes and even single process steps based on external as well as internal triggers. Examples of practical triggers are a continuously under performing IT service process (quality, availability, efficiency, etc.), the addition of new service suppliers, the withdrawal of a service by provider or the supplier, a fluctuation in market prices for services, a change in technological standards, or the intention to improve service level capacity and cost as part of its continues improvement strategy.
Somewhat similar problems have been encountered in other fields of endeavor. The structured representation of domain knowledge has become common on the world-wide web as the taxonomy categorization of websites such as Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, and many others have proven. Disciplines such as, for example, medicine, have already modeled large structured and standardized ontologies to share and annotate information in their field. Domain ontologies are primarily developed to enable the reuse of domain knowledge, make domain assumptions explicit, or analyze domain knowledge. According to one definition, an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization which is to be considered an abstract, simplified view of a world that is sought to be represented for some purpose. However, the domain of IT service management and service processes have barely considered ontologies for representing and structuring its vocabulary in a structured manner so far.
In summary, providers of IT services are under constant pressure to reduce cost and improve the quality of the services they provide. Accordingly, those skilled in the art seek methods and apparatus that can decompose IT services (which may be supplied either by a lone IT service provider or by a group of service providers) into elemental service processes and identify alternative service processes of potentially lower cost and/or improved quality which can be substituted into an existing IT service process to create a new IT service process having improved efficiency and lower cost.